There’s a pattern showing up in Search Console dashboards across almost every industry right now. Impressions look fine. Some are up. Clicks are falling off a cliff.
People have started calling it the great decoupling, which describes something genuinely new: visibility that no longer turns into visits.
The Numbers
The measurement work has been done several times now, using different methods, arriving at uncomfortably similar places.
Ahrefs published a study in February 2026 finding that AI Overviews correlate with a 58 per cent reduction in click-through rates for top-ranking pages. That figure had roughly doubled from the 34.5 per cent decline documented less than a year earlier.
Pew Research measured browsing behaviour instead of rankings and found eight per cent of users click a traditional result when an AI Overview appears, against fifteen per cent when one doesn’t. Chartbeat, tracking thousands of news sites, recorded a 33 per cent fall in Google referrals across 2025.
Three methods, three numbers, one direction.
What turns this into a business problem is where the advertising sits. For two decades the model ran on imperfect information. Someone searched, found a promising link, clicked, read the page, saw the advertising attached to it. Take out the click and the chain loses its anchor.
The Decline Isn’t Evenly Distributed
Which formats lose is more useful than the headline figure.
Informational queries have taken the worst of it. If someone asks how something works and a summary answers completely, there’s no residual reason to visit anything. The content got consumed without the visit happening.
Transactional queries behave differently. Someone searching for a specific product, in a specific configuration, in a specific place needs a listing, a price, and a way to proceed. Summarisation doesn’t substitute for availability.
Inventory-led formats like Vehicle Ads sit squarely in that second category. An ad showing an actual unit, with its price, mileage, location and a photograph of the real thing, isn’t information you can paraphrase away. It’s a specific offer about a specific object that either exists near you or doesn’t.
Which is why a collapse in informational CTR hasn’t produced an equivalent collapse in inventory advertising performance. The two formats answer different questions.
Your Dashboard Is Probably Lying
The practical consequence is that the old proxy metrics have quietly stopped working.
Impressions used to correlate loosely with traffic, which correlated loosely with revenue. That chain has broken. A campaign can now post rising impressions and falling everything else, and a dashboard built on the old assumptions will read that as improvement and keep funding it.
Position tracking has the same problem. Ranking first below an AI Overview is measurably worse than ranking third on a page that doesn’t have one. Identical rank number, different outcome.
Google isn’t indifferent to any of this. Five updates announced in May 2026, including a Further Exploration section of curated links, hover context on inline links, and expanded product review cards for shopping queries, were built to push traffic back toward source sites. Whether that reverses a 58 per cent decline is something traffic data will settle, not announcements.
The product review card expansion is aimed at shopping queries specifically, which suggests Google reached the same conclusion the data was already pointing at.
The Structural Problem Underneath
Google’s search advertising business generated more than fifty billion dollars in the first quarter of 2026 alone, and it depends on the continued existence of web content produced by people who are being systematically discouraged from producing it.
The strategic direction makes it worse. Search is being repositioned from a retrieval system into something closer to an agent that acts for you. Chrome is being rebuilt along similar lines. Both reduce the number of occasions anyone visits a website at all.
Regulators have noticed. The European Publishers Council filed a formal complaint with the European Commission, Penske Media brought an antitrust suit, and the EU opened a separate investigation into whether AI Overviews use publisher content unfairly.
For advertisers the question is narrower than the regulatory drama makes it look. It’s whether the specific formats you’re funding still produce a click, and whether your measurement can tell the difference between a format that’s stopped working and one that never relied on the mechanism that broke.
Most budget allocations were set before that difference mattered.
